That Screwed-up Agency (TSA)

Thursday night, 1 AM. After getting home from a Friendsgiving, I finally began packing for my flight home that was in about 7 hours. As I sluggishly attempted to choose which product was precious enough to be poured into my single 3.4 oz. travel container, I thought about the TSA. I had long been hearing claims that the TSA is mostly a waste of resources and a form of "security theater," whose main goal was to make people feel safe more than it actually prevents security threats. For example, according to the first article, when Homeland Security officials evaluated the agency by attempting to smuggle weapons and bombs 70 different times, they apparently succeeded 67 of those times.  

We all have our peeves with the TSA -- personally, it’s the “random extra security screenings” or the time they threw away the expensive 3.8 oz. moisturizer I’d accidentally packed. So articles like these once gave me hope that maybe they’d eventually loosen these restrictions, trim their inefficiencies, and focus resources on methods that work better. Our recent discussions in Public Choice regarding the Niskanen model of bureaucracies pretty much dashed that hope. The head of the Department of Homeland Security would maximize their utility by maximizing their budget, which results in an inefficient and inflated budget, operating where the marginal cost of their output is greater than the marginal benefit. In fact, if we consider that, much like with the police, the demand for outputs such as border security, the coast guard, and airport security is comparatively relatively inelastic, the potential inefficiencies could be even greater. Essentially, I think we’ll be taking our shoes off for the foreseeable future.